Page 18 of The Next Chapter

This is what I get for saying that I’m up for an adventure.

I’m suffering karma for my lie. I should have said no.

I don’t like adventure. If anything, I’m anti-adventure.

I’m a play it as safe as possible-er. But then I’d remembered the kayaking and that he’d had to wait while I drank all his coffee.

Plus, the fact that he’s asked me to come with him even though I’m quite clearly a liability in this environment.

My Fitbit tells me we’ve done 16,000 steps already and we’re not even at the top.

We’re trying our best to make small talk as we breathe heavily and continue to scale the mountain.

Needless to say, I haven’t exactly asked him about Lola.

My thighs are screaming and I’m trying to ration my water to avoid an adventurous pee, but really, I want to douse myself in the stuff.

The only good thing is that we’re walking up the side that’s in the shade.

I think if we were on the sunny side, I’d just lay down and die.

I try to take in our surroundings as much as possible.

Not because it’s beautiful and I want to appreciate nature’s majesty.

No, because I want to be able to relay as clearly as possible my location when I inevitably call Mountain Rescue and wait for them to helicopter me back down to ground level.

They’ll probably wonder what the hell we’re doing clambering up the face of the mountain when there’s a perfectly good path to the side.

As it is, I’d say we’re about three quarters of the way up.

It’s very high. Like seriously high. I feel like I should be wearing some sort of harness.

The loch stretches out in the valley bottom behind us, the water almost black from this vantage point, and the trees around the edges are like little toy figures.

‘Not much further.’ Even Noah is breathing heavily. He wipes his forearm across his head and then has a drink from the metal flask that he has in his backpack. I’m holding the bottom part of my trousers in my hand.

Noah is managing to be significantly more upright than I am, and Seb was right.

I catch him watching me a couple of times.

I’d be pretty pleased about this if I wasn’t so intently focused on maintaining three points of contact with the mountain at all times.

I have both feet and a hand touching it.

If this gets any steeper, I’ll need to crawl.

‘It’s just a bit of a scramble to get to the top,’ he tells me, re-screwing the top on the water.

I’ve not been letting myself look up. Because the one time I did, about two hours ago, I realized that we were closer to the bottom than the top and it had taken me a good ten minutes to recover from the fact.

But now I do look up. I’m pleased that the stupidly long and grabby grass seems to be coming to an end, but I’m dismayed to discover that it looks like it’s about to be replaced with a load of massive boulders, boulders that I’m meant to somehow climb over.

And fucking hell, is that snow? Do I need an oxygen mask?

‘I’ll help, don’t worry,’ Noah adds, clocking my expression. Because it goes without saying that I’ve not exactly blown him away with my athleticism this morning. The bit where I had to stop to dry heave by a bunch of pissed off looking sheep was a particular low point.

‘It’s just really high, isn’t it?’ I peer behind me down to the loch, almost immediately realizing that I’ve made a mistake. Heights and hangovers are no match made in heaven.

‘Well, it is a mountain.’

‘I know, I just didn’t think that it would be that high.

It’s not the Himalayas, is it? Though obviously, I’m having a lovely time.

’ I try to smile. If I was here with Seb, we’d have killed each other by now.

But getting to watch Noah’s muscles bunch as he climbs is perhaps the only positive to this walk.

Plus, I can’t moan too much lest I become an inconvenience to Noah.

Being an inconvenience is the stuff my nightmares are made of.

In the end, the boulders turn out to be more distracting than the grass.

There’s a hairy moment, when I almost lose my footing, and it turns out, when you’re sure that you’re about to fall to your death in the loch that you suspected would get you in the end, you forget all about the hangover pounding behind your eyes.

‘I’ve got you.’ Noah’s hands are on my waist. They’re big and firm and I could just rest here a second. Seb was right, he is like a mountain. So steady.

They’re still there. Warm, as if they’re burning a path through my clothes.

His eyes meet mine.

The jolt of something that I feel is so intense that I pull away. It’s alien to me, jolts of things when it comes to men.

Jesus. I can’t go lusting after Noah. He’s Lola’s pal and I’m her secret daughter. I’m lying to her and trying to kind of exploit her just a tiny bit.

I’m lying to him at the same time.

Well, there goes the lust.

Noah’s turned away from me. Probably he just doesn’t want to carry me the rest of the way. ‘The top is just over this one,’ he tells me.

One final scramble and mercifully the ground underneath my hands and knees is flat. Beautifully, wonderfully flat. I just stare at it where my head hangs between my arms for a second. Okay, maybe more like several minutes.

‘Lily, look at this.’

I lean back on my knees and blow up to my fringe, which not for the first time in its troubled existence has decided to plaster itself to my forehead.

I look up and oh my goodness, it really is something up here.

There are mountains everywhere, mist swirling around their summits.

The sun is out and you can see for miles in every direction. The ocean, the mountains…

I’m still on my knees and now I have the ridiculous urge to cry.

Maybe I could pass it off as relief at having summitted an actual mountain.

It’s just that looking out like that, across the other mountains on one side and the ocean on the other, it’s all so vast. And how are we meant to control very much of anything in the face of so much vastness?

Noah’s hand lands on my shoulder.

‘Do you need a hand up?’ he asks.

I nod, still not trusting myself to speak, and then his hand is in mine, and I’m being pulled up and we’re so close I can feel his breath on my forehead. ‘Come on, let’s go and sit on the other side,’ he says.

I follow him and we sit on the side of the mountain that’s in the sun, because now that we’ve stopped moving, I feel the chill in the air ever more keenly.

‘It’s so beautiful here,’ I tell him. ‘You should definitely include it in your top five… Just tell people to take the path.’

He laughs. ‘I forgot how much of a pull it is up. Worth it once you’re here, though. It’s one of my favourite spots,’ he says.

‘It really is lovely… and a bit humbling.’ God, I can’t get emotional now, Noah will think I’m certifiable.

He nods, still looking out. ‘That’s what I like too. The world is so big, nothing we do really matters when you think about it.’

I agree with the sentiment, I just don’t like to confront the reality that what we do doesn’t count.

‘Have you always been a travel writer?’ I ask him.

‘Pretty much. I was never very good at staying in one place. How about you?’

‘Oh, I love staying in one place. I hate the thought of having no roots. It’s a big deal for me, to leave home.’

Noah looks my way and then laughs, his head between his arms where they’re resting on his knees.

‘I meant about being a memoirs writer.’

‘Right, course you did, not the roots thing.’ I can feel my face heating up. ‘But yes, I’ve always worked at Your Life. I love it, actually. I find people so interesting.’

‘I find them a bit scary. Prefer a good tree.’

I burst out laughing at that, but seriously, just when he couldn’t get any sexier, he throws out there that he’s a bit shy.

After that, we sit quietly for a while, enjoying being the only people up here, while I process all the things I’ve learned about Noah.

I mean, even without the lying thing, he is absolutely awful for me. In every way. Which makes the pull I feel towards him even more inexplicable.

That’s not why I’m here, though. I think of my Google search last night.

‘Have you known Lola a long time?’ I ask, venturing into dangerous territory.

Noah nods. ‘Since I was eighteen. I, er, got into a bit of trouble and she helped me get sorted. She’s really special.’

Oh.

‘And how old are you?’ I ask, as casually as I can muster.

‘Thirty, why?’

‘No reason.’ I shrug while really, my mind is whirling. Lola was being all nice to Noah around the time she called Dad to ask to talk to me, then. I don’t know how to process that information, or to reconcile Noah saying that Lola is amazing when she’s been anything but to me.

Anger lights up inside of me.

‘Between you and me—’ Noah leans towards me ‘—I’ve got a bit of an ulterior motive for staying the whole summer.’

‘You do?’ I ask, thinking that Skye must be synonymous with ulterior motives.

‘Yeah, you’ve probably noticed that the hotel is a little… er…’

I presume Noah is digging around for a polite way to say dump.

‘It has a sort of charm to it,’ I answer.

‘Aye, it does that. But Lola, she won’t ask for any help. Tries to do it all on her own and I thought I’d try to fix the place up, without telling her, like. She’s so stubborn.’

Noah laughs like this is a good thing.

‘That’s really kind, Noah,’ I tell him, meaning it.

It looks like Noah is going to say more, but then his eyes flick to behind me, surprise registering in them.

‘Lola,’ he says.

‘What about her?’ My brain is scrambled from his revelation.

‘She’s here.’

‘Where?’

I don’t even have time to school my reaction properly as I twist around.

‘Lola,’ I say, sounding more winded from the sight of her than the climb up the mountain. ‘What are you doing here?’